The new Tate Modern opens in June with three weeks of live art and performance across all of the museum, with stress on the word “all”. None will be staged in a theatre space, however. “My interest in performance comes from a perverse interest in not putting things in boxes,” says Catherine Wood, the Tate’s curator of contemporary art and performance. “Or not believing you can separate art and life. If you start looking at it, all post-war art has a relationship to the body. We want to show that. Some of it is through live events.”
So when Tate Modern was planning its Herzog & de Meuron-designed, high-rise extension, Wood lobbied hard not to have a separate, purpose-built theatre space, with user-friendly sprung-floor stage, retractable seating and possibly a picture window framing the skyline of the capital.
“It is interesting the Whitney has this rather beautiful grey box with views of the Hudson in their gorgeous new building. It’s very flexible and user-friendly,” she says. But Tate Modern has the Tanks, former oil storage tanks in the basement of the converted power station, which opened briefly in 2012 for 15 weeks of high-intensity programming. Highlights included a site-specific adaptation by Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker of her work, Fase. “The Tanks are as-found spaces. We’ve had the south Tank treated acoustically, and we have a lighting rig and projection booth, but we don’t have the same degree of neutrality and flexibility. However, artists love it and really respond to the space: the traces of industry, the smell of it, the weird markings on the wall, the roughness,” Wood says.
During June and July, Tate Modern’s BMW-sponsored live art and performance programme will spill out of the Tanks into the cavernous Turbine Hall nearby, where among other happenings two mounted police officers will kettle visitors – a repeat performance of Tania Bruguera’s Tatlin’s Whisper #5 (2008).
Visitors may encounter Amalia Pica’s double-hander, Strangers, on level two among the Minimalist art. Or they may find a group of five dancers posing or acting out a sculpture by Carl Andre, Richard Serra, or even the Mona Lisa for Public Collection Tate Modern—a new commission by the artists Alexandra Pirici and Manuel Pelmus.
During the reinstallation of the collection in the run-up to the reopening, Wood has been wearing “two hats”, she says. “I’ve been installing works in the new building, so what we have been trying to do is create a new continuity between what’s on display in the collection galleries upstairs and what you see in the Tanks.”
There will be live performances among the objects, and in the Tanks three Minimalist works by Robert Morris, Rasheed Araeen and Charlotte Posenenske will be presented barrier-free. “You will be able to walk through them and interact with them in a way the artist intended.”